Exclusive: Nick D'Aloisio to combine Oxford studies with Yahoo role

Nick D'Aloisio talks to Wired.co.uk exclusively about heading to university with his cohort, continuing work on Yahoo News Digest for the Apple Watch and why his future lies in building AI brains.

It's been a long three years since Nick D'Aloisio was a 15-year-old tinkering away on a summarisation app that used natural language processing to rewrite the news. At 16, the resulting Summly app had caught the attention of investors including Tory Carter, Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Yoko Ono and by 17 his company was snapped up by Yahoo! With 18-months at the tech giant, the launch of Summly-inspired Yahoo News Digest and his A-levels under his belt, D'Aloisio has now exclusively revealed to Wired.co.uk that he is heading back to academia, taking up a joint honours in Computer Science and Philosophy at Oxford University's Hertford College later this month, while continuing to ferry back and forth to California as Project Manager at Digest. "It's always been a passion of mine to learn," he tells Wired.co.uk. "Although a lot of business stuff is fun, at the end of the day I'm a technologist and I'm passionate about the subject."

D'Aloisio, now 18, taught himself how to programme at a young age and is an ardent supporter of autodidacticism. But sitting across from Wired.co.uk a week before this announcement, the teenager was visibly excited about taking himself out of the office -- at least during term holidays -- and into a rather more traditional learning environment. It's part of the reason he chose Oxford -- the tradition being a great juxtaposition to his other life in Silicon Valley.

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Wearables are a massive catalyst for shortform contentNick D'Aloisio

to introduce the world to Yahoo News Digest.

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He will, however, have his work cut out for him in juggling the dual roles. Because as we saw onstage at Apple's latest product unveiling, Yahoo News Digest was front and centre on the Watch. D'Aloisio tells us he will busily be working in between term-time to deliver an app in time for the predicted January Watch launch.

He believes the latest incarnation of Yahoo News Digest, recently launched on iPad, has hit the "sweet spot" with its news bursts delivered at 8am and 6pm to mimic the traditional newspaper cycle. Where Summly would breakdown individual stories, Yahoo News Digest is now positioned as the definitive, editorially curated summarisation of what's going on in the world, says D'Aloisio.

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Naturally, the next stage is to shrink that simplicity down further, translating the sleek and minimalist design we've already come to expect from the Yahoo app to an even more refined alternative for wearables.

"Wearables are a massive catalyst for shortform content," says D'Aloisio. "I know that Twitter's been around for while, along with other services. But you now have a visceral need for it because it's on your wrist. It's no longer a conceptual requirement -- it's physically impossible to put 1,000 words on that."

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He and his team were notified about the launch a few week's ahead of time, so have been working "very aggressively" since that time "to own news on these devices". Ideas are still in the making, but D'Aloisio says breaking news will likely have a large role to play. "What does a person really want when they look at their watch? They're probably in a conversation and want to get a glance, so breaking news becomes a big component. Because if they have enough time to get their phone out, they'll just get their phone out. As a result the use cases for the Watch are five to ten second windows."

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With AI we've hit a glass ceiling we have to smash throughNick D'Aloisio

Yahoo News Digest already sifts the news down to around eight to 12 stories, a mixture of images, video, text, stock tickers and more. "Can we produce a further summary of that?" he asks. Whatever the answer, design will be at the forefront. The iPad app looks like a sign of things to come, with nice touches like a green signal at the end telling the user they are done and other design details ensuring the reader is incentivised to get to the end of all the stories, which D'Aloisio says points to the "pseudo-gamification of news".

It's easy to see why he wanted to pursue philosophy, as he discusses the "sense of completion" the app gives users by offering an alternative to the constant flow of ever-refreshing news streams that "create paranoia". He wants to make the infinite nature of the internet into something finite, helpful and beautiful with Yahoo News Digest, and challenge the way we haphazardly consume everything in sight.

The combination of philosophy and computer science also plays well into his ultimate goal: "to be a part of the evolution in AI in which we cross to deep AI", and start building brains.

Summly was at its heart an AI company, and D'Aloisio has invested in the Google-acquired Deep Mind. When he talks of starting new companies in the future, and of heading straight to university because "time is ticking on", the reason behind it is artificial intelligence -- he wants to be part of the rapid advances being made, and the infinite possibilities if we crack it. "With AI we've hit a glass ceiling we have to smash through. The next stage of building a brain is super fascinating and I would love to spectate or be involved in that process because it really will change the world, I think in a better way. "Intellectually, it's such a fascinating problem. It's an interdisciplinary problem -- that's why I'm doing philosophy."

A success story like Mojang inspires me to do my next company in EuropeNick D'Aloisio

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The "holy grail of technology", as he refers to it, is currently sat at a crossroads while we mull over the general AI problems we have not solved, like natural language generation. "We can distil them down and throw R&D at them, but we will hit fundamental walls mathematically and in order to get breakthroughs we need to look to other parts of the field that are more rudimentary. We need to have insights that are totally nontrivial and counterintuitive and wild."

If his hopes are realised, those insights and the companies that benefit from them could be made in Europe, which he speaks enthusiastically about as a startup culture hub. He lists Berlin, Paris and Tel-Aviv as hotspots he is excited about and keeping his eye on for talent, but he is also visibly proud to be a UK entrepreneur and a proponent of our education system. He's excited about the new curriculum getting kids to hopefully question why a computer is different to a human being (because "as a teenager you're thinking about those things anyway" apparently) and speaks of A-level mathematics and physics as being on a par with US undergraduate programmes. "I'm not having a go at [the Silicon Valley ecosystem]," he says. "But there was something very nice when I did Summly about being in London, with a team of investors round me. A success story like Mojang inspires me to do my next company in Europe."

So if you see D'Aloisio hanging round the Bridge of Sighs sometime soon, you can probably expect to see him debating the ethics of sentient beings with an Oxford fellow, getting a team of AI enthusiasts together for his next company, and perhaps studying up for a spot on University Challenge -- "Jeremy Paxman mentioned Summly the other night on it and it was one of my favourite things, I freaked out". It's nice to know that, beyond the lofty aspirations, ridiculously talented and overachieving 18-year-old millionaires can still get excited about Paxman.